Hello,

I went to the shop today to see how the beast is doing. They got the transmission, transfer case, rear end fluids changed just waiting on the brakes. But when they drained the rear end a chunk of metal and shavings came out. Tomorrow the lead mechanic will take a look and see what is going on. Looks like it is a piece of tooth from the ring gear. Would this cause bad vibration and 2 how much to fix it.

Scott

 

It depends on what section of the ring the chunk came from. Make sure they check the spider gear cross shaft and the retainer bolt. My 1998 P71 would occasionally jerk and make an awful noise. It felt like another car had hit me in the back! Upon removing the cover on the rear end I too found a chunk of ring gear, off of the very top of a tooth. The retainer bolt had sheared (probably from my tire smoking starts) and the spider shaft would try and slide out, contacting the ring gear. It actually had bent the shaft just enough that I couldn't drive it out to replace it. So I welded the shaft to the carrier on both ends and it lived happily thereafter. Never made a noise or vibrated at all.

 

My son was able to find me a rear end at a salvage yard for $300. We swapped it out and put another 100,000 miles on it before I sold it to my sons father in law. It was much, much cheaper to do it that way than it was to rebuild the existing rear end.

At least you weren't driving down the road and looking at your passenger side rearview mirror and saw your rear tire and a length of axle a couple of feet from where it was supposed be......
Good luck and hopefully it will be something minor???

 

the Head mechanic has been out he will be looking at it on monday see what needs to happen i could swap a rear end myself but not rebuild 1 never done it. and we found this because i wanted the fluid changed

 

I wouldn't do any worrying until your mechanic gives you the down low on it. With the weekend upon us, if your area salvage yards are open on Saturdays, you might be able to call local salvage yards and try to price a rear end, just so you have some numbers to compare when the mechanic gives you the word / estimate. Otherwise its an Alka-Seltzer wait and see moment.

 

Nice thing is i barder for my work so not a huge issue just more work for me to do. He needs an electronic filing system and a parts inventory system setup. Just a bit of tech work.

 

That shouldn't be to difficult of a problem to work out, unless you have to write the code from scratch instead of a "canned" program.

 

already found an opensource program to use for the document managment. He also runs a body shop. and we think his shop software will do the inventory just need to figure out how